Robert X. Cringlely has been covering IT for decades and has been critical of Indian Bowel Movement's (IBM) labor practices and ethnic cleansing of American techies. Here he destroys many of the myths regarding the slumdog scabs and their (ab)use by the high-tech junta:

The H-1B visa program was created in 1990 to allow companies to bring skilled technical workers into the USA. It’s a non-immigrant visa and so has nothing at all to do with staying in the country, becoming a citizen, or starting a business. Big tech employers are constantly lobbying for increases in H-1B quotas citing their inability to find qualified US job applicants. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and other leaders from the IT industry have testified about this before Congress. Both major political parties embrace the H-1B program with varying levels of enthusiasm.

But Bill Gates is wrong. What he said to Congress may have been right for Microsoft but was wrong for America and can only lead to lower wages, lower employment, and a lower standard of living. This is a bigger deal than people understand: it’s the rebirth of industrial labor relations circa 1920. Our ignorance about the H-1B visa program is being used to unfairly limit wages and steal -- yes, steal -- jobs from US citizens...

More bullshit, as usual, from the Punjab Pimp. Of course, no mention of his use of cheap H-1Bs in his past life as a failed hi-tech scammer and vaporware peddler:

“The period of unprecedented expansion of immigrant-led entrepreneurship that characterized the 1980s and 1990s has come to a close,” writes an ominous new Kauffman Foundation report from Stanford researcher and Washington Post columnist, Vivek Wadhwa.

He and his team of researchers are finding that, despite being the source of venerable American businesses, from Carnegie to Google, immigrants no longer see the United States as the only land of dreams, driven in large part by Congress’s inability to enact high-skill friendly immigration reform. In the words of immigrant and President of Xerox’s Innovation Group Sophie Vandebroek, with whom Wadhwa spoke for his new book, Immigrant Exodus: “Clearly the attraction the United States had on people like myself two to three decades ago is very different now. Countries all over the globe now have successful and growing research universities and labs.”

Summary: Automaker Toyota alleges that one of its former programmers sabotaged web applications and security systems.

Automaker Toyota alleges that one of its former programmers sabotaged web applications and security systems, and has filed a lawsuit in reprisal.

Ibrahimshah Shahulhameed was fired last week by the corporation. In an Aug. 24 complaint, Toyota says that the former programmer sabotaged its computer systems at Toyota Motor Manufacturing.

The Indian contract programmer apparently attacked the system -- crashing it in the process -- and managed to download information that is "highly confidential".

The complaint was submitted to the U.S. District Court in Lexington. Toyota says within the lawsuit:

"If this information were disseminated to competitors or otherwise made public, it would be highly damaging to Toyota and its suppliers, causing immediate and irreparable damage. The worker had no authority to access or use Toyota's property or trade secrets and it is undisputed that he did access it and altered computer programs and codes."

After being dismissed for unacceptable behavior, Shahulhameed allegedly accessed the U.S. parts supply website portal toyotasupplier.com, manipulating 3 web applications and altering security certificates that caused system failure. After doing so, the programmer downloaded documents including pricing specs, parts and quality testing data. The company believes that if this data falls into third-party hands, it could cause irreparable harm.

The complaint says it will "take days for Toyota's IT department to determine the full extent of its damage as a result of th Defendant's efforts to sabotage its system."

The rapidly-filed lawsuit also includes a temporary restraining order issued from U.S. judge Karen Caldwell, banning the programmer from leaving the country while the investigation proceeds. Shahulhameed has also been ordered to hand over all of Toyota's property and data.

According to reports, the automaker's officials don't believe sensitive company material has been distributed. Toyota spokesman Rick Hesterberg said:

"We are and will continue to investigate this thoroughly, but currently we do not believe that any supplier data or proprietary information has been distributed."

Judge stops ex-Toyota worker from leaving country

BRETT BARROUQUERE, Associated Press

Updated 12:47 p.m., Monday, August 27, 2012

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — A federal judge has ordered a former computer programmer for Toyota from leaving the United States while the company investigates the damage done by an alleged computer hacking incident.

U.S. District Judge Karen Caldwell in Lexington also ordered Ibrahimshah Shahulhameed of Georgetown, Ky., to forfeit any information and data he took from the computer system of Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Lexington, Toyota alleged that Shahulhameed illegally accessed the website www.toyotasupplier.com after being dismissed from his contract position on Thursday. The company claims Shahulhameed reset the website and computer system to automatically crash.

Rick Hesterberg, a Toyota Motor Manufacturing spokesman, said the company is still gathering facts in the case.

"This is an ongoing investigation involving a former contractor," Hesterberg told The Associated Press.

Efforts to locate Shahulhameed were not immediately successful Monday afternoon.

Shahulhameed worked on contract as a computer programmer for Toyota until being let go on Thursday. At that point, Toyota alleged, Shahulhameed, a native of India, accessed Toyota's internal computer system without authorization and copied, downloaded and possibly disseminated trade secrets and proprietary information. Included in that information was pricing information, quality testing data and parts testing data, Toyota's attorney, Mindy Barfield, wrote in the complaint.

"If this information were disseminated to competitors or otherwise made public, it would be highly damaging to Toyota, and its suppliers, causing immediate and irreparable damage," Barfield wrote.

Toyota claims that Shahulhameed spent more than six hours inside the computer system's firewall on Thursday and Friday. Toyota also said Shahulhameed reprogrammed at least 13 applications the computer system in an effort to cause it to crash.

Barfield wrote that Shahulhameed also removed critical security certifications on the company's internal server, causing the programs to become inoperable.

Barfield was unsure how long it would take for Toyota's technology department to repair the damage. The website www.toyotasupplier.com serves as a portal for current suppliers to Toyota, as well as a place for companies seeking to do business with Toyota to find information and work in a potential deal. As of Monday afternoon, the site appeared to be working.

"(Shahulhameed) had no authority to access or use Toyota's property or trade secrets and it is undisputed that he did access it and altered computer programs and codes," Barfield wrote.

Caldwell, in an order issued Saturday, barred Shahulhameed from traveling out of the country for 14 days. Caldwell noted that Shahulhameed had planned to leave the United States and return to India for an undetermined amount of time.

Shahulhameed was also required to post $2,500 bond, which he did Monday.

Toyota is seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages from Shahulhameed.

California: Company Faces 2nd Suit Over Visas

A new whistle-blower lawsuit has been filed against Infosys, the giant Indian outsourcing company, by a man who says he was harassed into quitting after he reported visa fraud by managers there. Satya Dev Tripuraneni, an American who worked for Infosys for five years in California, says the company billed fraudulently for workers brought from India on short-term visitor visas and also evaded taxes. After he reported his concerns, he was threatened and demoted, Mr. Tripuraneni claims in the lawsuit filed in federal court for the Northern District of California. Danielle D’Angelo, an Infosys spokeswoman, said the company had started an internal investigation of the claims. A trial in the case of Jay Palmer, another whistle-blower who reported suspected visa fraud at Infosys, begins Aug. 20 in Montgomery, Ala.

This complaint is horribly written and the case probably went nowhere. I put in a call to the lawyer and he is supposed to call me back, but I doubt he will be much help. But it does give you some insight into the hi-tech junta...

Infosys Visa Fraud Trial Should Leave CIOs ‘Worried’

Infosys, the Indian IT outsourcing giant, is headed to court this month, to face allegations that it committed visa fraud to bring workers to the United States, and then tried to intimidate a whistleblower. Immigration and outsourcing experts say recent scrutiny facing the practice means CIOs need to be more vigilant when monitoring outsourcing firms who work onsite, or face harm to company reputation, and even legal consequences and the deportation of staff.

The civil suit, filed by a former consultant with the firm, alleges that Infosys improperly used short-term business travel documents, known as B1 visas, to bring Indian workers to the United States to work on client sites. The case will go to federal court in Alabama on August 20, after attempts at a settlement collapsed last week.

Jack Palmer, the former employee, claims he was asked to fill out paperwork for the employee travel visas, falsely representing the purposes of these trips as short visits for meetings. When he refused and reported the violations to the company’s corporate counsel, Palmer alleges Infosys managers retaliated by withholding bonuses and pulling him off job sites. Infosys also did not withhold federal or state taxes from these employees, the suit alleges. Infosys is now the target of a federal criminal investigation, probing its use of visitor visas, the company stated in a corporate filing in May.

“There is not and never has been a policy to use B1 visas to circumnavigate visa policies,” said Danielle D’Angelo, a spokeswoman for Infosys. “We have never retaliated against any employee and any allegations that say otherwise are simply not accurate.”

The practice of improperly using business travel visas is common for outsourcers that send workers to client sites, said Phil Fersht, CEO of HfS, an outsourcing research firm. The H1B work visa–the appropriate document for longer-term onsite work–costs companies thousands of dollars per employee and the federal government has reduced their availability in recent years. “Outsourcers are trying to get staff to work an engagement as quickly as possible and they will work the system as much as possible,” Fersht said.

CIOs contemplating the hiring of on-site outsourcers can expose their companies to grave reputational harm if they don’t ask the right questions, Fersht said. “They should be worried.”

Even if the client company has no knowledge of outsourcer visa policies, it can be named in legal actions surrounding the case, like numerous Fortune 500 companies named in the Infosys civil case documents. “I don’t think any American organization wants their name attached to foreign employees on incorrect visas, in widely publicized court battles,” Fersht said.

To avoid this reputational harm Fersht says CIOs should push outsourcers to ensure that workers brought into the office are on the correct visa. “They’ve got every right to validate the immigration status of every employee sitting in their office.”

James Nolan, a New York-based immigration attorney, says CIOs who use outsourcers could also find themselves in legal hot water if they help facilitate a visa under false pretenses. CIOs may be asked by a foreign outsourcer to provide the “welcome” document needed for a business travel visa, which states that an outsourced employee is coming into the country for a meeting or training. But if he knows the worker will actually do longer-term work onsite, he could be committing immigration fraud, Nolan said. “If it’s ongoing and systematic, they could be prosecuted,” he said.

CIOs who use outsourcers who are not aboveboard on immigration issues also risk being left with projects incomplete, if a crackdown leads to workers being deported, said Ben Trowbridge, CEO of Alsbridge, an outsourcing consulting firm. “If your provider has to have people sent back, an essential system can go down because of the disruption to the team,” Trowbridge said.

Slumdog shill Vivek Wadhwa was once again talking about death threats and racist xenophobes in a panel discussion at the Brookings Institute. Jared Bernstein gave him a rhetorical ass-kicking, and Fraudhwa was left mumbling about his nemesis Ron Hira and incoherently trivializing the ethnic cleansing of American workers at the hands of his Indian brethren.

To fill the jobs, CSC recruited heavily in India – over half the staff, according to CSC workers who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of being fired. CSC did not respond to questions about foreign workers.

And this is pretty fuckin' absurd:

CSC celebrated the amended contract with an invitation to a July 28, 2011, picnic at Umstead Park: “Please plan to join us for BBQ and Indian Cuisine! It will be a great time to get to know your co-workers as well (as key CSC and DHHS) executives. You might even have the chance to challenge them to a game of bean bag toss or horseshoes!”

WTF?

Costs soar for updating NC's Medicaid computer system

In 1998, the state of New York hired Computer Services Corporation to design and run a new processing system. The new system came on line in 2005, 33 months late and $166 million over budget, a cost overrun of 47 percent. The state comptroller blamed the delay and cost overrun on both CSC and the state Department of Health.

As it built the new system, CSC was also operating the old claims system. The dual roles meant the state was paying CSC for both jobs, giving the company little incentive to bring the new system in a timely manner, according to the comptroller’s office.

The comptroller also found that the system was not based on the best technology available at the time and was unable to make timely changes when state or federal laws changed. The problems in New York were not solely the fault of CSC. The comptroller found that the Department of Health provided ineffective oversight and missed opportunities to levy penalties allowed under the contract. The department didn’t have a contingency plan in place, and when it came time in 2006 to negotiate an extension, CSC demanded a three-year extension at a cost increase of 62 percent. The comptroller initially opposed the new contract but relented when CSC said it would stop processing claims.

[THIS LOOKS LIKE A TARGET RICH ENVIRONMENT]

People walk to and from the employee parking lot during lunch hour at CSC in Raleigh. CSC holds the biggest contract in state history, a half-billion effort to replace the state's antiquated Medicaid claims program. The computer system is years behind schedule, with hundreds of millions in cost overruns.

RALEIGH In a bland office park off Lake Boone Trail, two computer teams toil away on behalf of the biggest contract in state history – the computer system that processes 88 million Medicaid claims each year.

The 500-plus team of workers from Computer Sciences Corporation, a tech company from northern Virginia, is working to finish the new system by next summer. Upstairs, 200 workers from Hewlett Packard, the technology giant from California, keeps the old 1980s-era system running, receiving, auditing and paying about 250,000 claims each day.

The project has gone in fits and starts since it began in 2004: cancelled and rebid, then amended and extended. Costs have kept rising, so much so that the expense of setting up the new system and running it for seven years, plus maintaining the old system, now adds up to an eye-popping figure: $851 million.

And that’s if it goes on line next summer, as scheduled.

Little in this project has gone as scheduled. The first contractor was dismissed, only $16 million into the work. The second, CSC, is two years behind its original timeline. In the world of information technology, the delays and overruns earn it the title of a “black swan” project.

Most of the delays and cost increases come from changes in federal and state laws and regulations, according to Al Delia, secretary of the state Department of Health and Human Services. He likened it to a home construction project where the owner asks the builder to add a second floor and garage midstream.

“Most of what have been called cost overruns aren’t really cost overruns,” Delia said.

In the long run, state officials say, the new system has the potential to save the state hundreds of millions of dollars. Along with processing claims for Medicaid – the government health care plan for the poor and disabled – the contract requires the system to be able to process claims from other payers, such as the State Health Plan or the state prison system.

“We expect this will be cutting edge, state of the art,” Delia said.

If so, it will be an unusual cutting-edge system: it’s largely written in COBOL, a computer language developed in the 1950s that is scarcely taught in North Carolina – just community colleges in Hickory and Charlotte. CSC has imported workers from India to fill the jobs in Raleigh.

Legislators wonder if state officials will ever be able to get the project finished.

“The $640 million question is, will the Medicaid system operate as billed?” asked state Rep. Nelson Dollar, a Cary Republican who co-chairs a committee that oversees DHHS. “We are skeptical until we see it.”

CSC declined to answer questions, but released a statement saying the project would be completed on time and within budget: “This new system will enable the State to better manage costs, improve healthcare administrative efficiency and enhance customer service for healthcare providers and recipients.... We are focused on delivering a high performance healthcare system that meets the specific needs of North Carolina and its constituents.”

High hopes

In 2003, the state solicited bids to replace the outmoded Medicaid claims system, which had been operated for 35 years by EDS, a Texas company later purchased by Hewlett Packard. Millions of lines of computer code power the program, which accepts claims from some 70,000 providers – doctors, clinics, hospitals, nursing homes and others.

It’s a big business: the Medicaid program will cost nearly $13 billion in North Carolina this year, about 23 percent from state funds and the rest federal. The new system is designed to detect fraud and avoid waste.

Federal tax dollars pay for 90 percent of the design of the new program and half of its operating costs.

There were high hopes in 2004 when the state gave the $171 million contract to Affiliated Computer Systems to replace the 1980s system.

The project “continues to forge ahead with great expectations,” according to a 2005 letter from Angeline Sligh, the director of the project. “It is our goal that this be one of the best replacement implementations in the nation.”

The project soon fell behind, with DHHS officials and ACS arguing over timeline and payments, each blaming the other for the mess. In May 2006, State Chief Information Officer George Bakolia threatened to kill the project unless the two sides could resolve their differences and come up with workable plan. Bakolia demanded new project managers at DHHS and ACS.

In July 2006, the state cancelled the contract, and eventually paid ACS $16.5 million, partly for work, partly to settle a lawsuit.

The state replaced its project managers, who run the program day to day. Their supervisors – Sligh and her boss, Assistant Secretary for Finance Dan Stewart – remained on the job.

An extension, a picnic

Round two began in 2008, when the state awarded a $265 million contract to CSC, with a go-live date of August 2011.

The contract sparked a fierce fight. HP, which runs the 1980s system, was a bidder on the new contract and protested on technical and political grounds: CSC had retained former DHHS Deputy Secretary Lanier Cansler as a lobbyist. Weeks after the contract award, Cansler was named DHHS secretary by Gov. Bev Perdue.

Stewart denied the protest.

In its bid documents, CSC estimated that 90 percent of the millions of lines of computer code needed could be copied from its New York Medicaid program. CSC later revised that to 73 percent; in the end, because of big differences between the New York and North Carolina Medicaid programs, only 32 percent of the New York code was used.

The program soon fell behind, and in the summer of 2010 CSC asked for an extension. Following a lengthy negotiation, the state granted an 18- to 22-month extension and raised the contract price to $495 million.

CSC celebrated the amended contract with an invitation to a July 28, 2011, picnic at Umstead Park: “Please plan to join us for BBQ and Indian Cuisine! It will be a great time to get to know your co-workers as well (as key CSC and DHHS) executives. You might even have the chance to challenge them to a game of bean bag toss or horseshoes!”

Delia, who became DHHS secretary in February, says CSC added six months of delay by overestimating how much code it could bring from New York. The company agreed to pay the state $10 million in damages, an amount criticized as unsubstantiated and low in a subsequent state audit.

The rest of the delay, Delia said, stems from changes in federal and state laws and regulations, and was out of the control of DHHS.

A January report from State Auditor Beth Wood questioned the six-month figure, saying that DHHS did a poor job of documenting how it made key decisions: determining the six-month delay; calculating the damages owed by CSC; and tracking $30 million in unauthorized changes that CSC made in the program.

The audit was contentious from the start. Stewart told Wood that his staff was too busy to answer questions and provide documents. Their cooperation “will, by necessity, be minimal due to the lack of staff time, the urgency to complete the project and the liability related to delaying the IT contractors working on the project.”

The department’s response, twice as long as the audit, disagreed with virtually every paragraph, calling the audit biased, inaccurate, unproductive, ill-informed, unfounded and asinine.

Wood called the audit the most difficult of her career.

“It was the most uncooperative, dragging-the-feet, missing-deadlines audit like I’ve never seen,” she said.

During a hearing in January, legislators looking into the project asked Angie Sligh to grade her management of the contract. She gave herself an A.

Writing in COBOL

The audit did not touch on the fact that the state contracted in 2008 for a program written in COBOL, a computer language written in the 1950s. According to Bakolia, the former state chief information officer, COBOL is used in banking, transportation and federal systems that have been in use for decades, but it is almost never used in new systems.

“If the programs are written well and operate, companies don’t want to rewrite them,” Bakolia said. “If I were to write something today, it would not be COBOL. You can’t support it.”

In North Carolina, classes in COBOL are as popular as 8-track tapes. Wake Tech’s extensive computer science offerings don’t have COBOL, and neither does N.C. State.

Frank Mueller, an N.C. State computer science professor, said the supply of COBOL programmers is dwindling as people retire.

“As a consultant to any company, I would probably advise them against using COBOL,” Mueller said. “The problem is that it’s harder to find someone to change the code. If you change the law, you have to change the code.”

Asked about COBOL in an interview Thursday, Stewart said: “This is the first time I’ve ever heard that question raised.”

To fill the jobs, CSC recruited heavily in India – over half the staff, according to CSC workers who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of being fired. CSC did not respond to questions about foreign workers.

Stewart said he had no idea about the staff makeup.

“I have never seen their staff,” he said.

Delia said it is not an issue.

“It’s a private company, we have no way of knowing,” Delia said. “They are legal workers, it’s kind of a non-question.”

After working through a tough audit, firing a contractor and enduring multiple extensions, state officials have now turned their attention to another participant in the project: their own watchdog.

They are threatening to fire Maximus Inc., the Virginia firm paid to police the project for the state. Maximus, nearing the end of a three-year contract, is paid $1 million a year.

Exclusive Cost-cutting RBS management had halved the team within which the banking group's recent data disaster happened, sources have told The Register. The sacked British employees were replaced by staff in India, and there had been concerns about the quality of the work done in India for a lengthy period prior to last week's catastrophe.

Mishandling of batch schedule data while backing out of an update to CA-7 batch processing software last week caused the disruption [1] that led to 16.9 million customers at RBS, Natwest and Ulsterbank being frozen out of their accounts for days, and ongoing issues in some cases.

The actual CA-7 software support team is wholly based in the UK and according to our sources, RBS has not cut that team.

However the batch scheduling team in the UK was cut, and certain of the jobs taken from the UK were made up with staff from RBS's Indian offices at Technology Services India [2]. Though there were competent people working there, our sources said quality of work from India was patchy and that they had raised these problems with RBS management for the past two years.

Batch scheduling and why it's important

Batch scheduling is intrinsic to the process of the nightly data crunching performed by CA-7. The batch scheduling team prepare and schedule data for input into CA-7, gathering it from RBS's systems.

One source said:

The batch team was about 60 guys ... they ran applications that chose the jobs that ran - maintaining the CA-7 schedule, not the CA-7 support ... There were no redundancies in the CA-7 team but the batch support were taken down to about 30.

A second source told us that all UK-based RBS IT teams in areas considered non-critical had suffered redundancies of 50-70 per cent, depending on the individual teams. In many cases the headcount in the cut departments was maintained by hiring staff in RBS's Technology Services India.

The job advert we have previously reported [3] for a CA-7 consultant in India would have been for the batch scheduling team, not for the CA-7 software support team itself. These screen grabs of a CV from LinkedIn, supplied to us by the cantankerous blog [4] (the information has now been taken down) confirm that RBS runs at least one batch scheduling team in its offshore branch in India.

This meant RBS lost experienced employees familiar with their complex mainframe systems:

On the batch team a lot of them were lifers, had been working on that for many years.

As noted in previous Reg stories, it is understood that the error was made when backing out of an upgrade from CA-7 v11.1 to v11.3. The CA-7 upgrade took place at the weekend of 16/17th June and a problem was noticed on Monday which prompted a back-out from the upgrade on Tuesday night. In the back-out, an "inexperienced operator" made the wrong move and the day's data was wiped from the system. This created the backlog that has taken so long to clear.

Quality problems with work from RBS India

Both sources told us that though RBS's Technology Services India branch contained very competent people, the quality of work from there was patchy, and team managers frequently flagged up problems from about the quality of the work from India.

In several cases it was hard to recruit enough staff with the right skills.

"Team managers were struggling to get enough qualified staff, and were forced to take on people they had previously rejected. They were forced to take them to keep headcount," one source says. "People were considered to be fine technically but inexperienced."

A second source backed that up: "They obviously learn UNIX at uni but they don't know about IBM mainframes."

As a result there seemed to be frequent issues with the work performed. "We experienced great frustration" said one source, "some teams were great, but many we found we couldn't trust or struggled with."

One of our sources described an instance where he had overseen an upgrade to one of the bank's important systems (not the batch processing in this case) and described how the whole team involved in RBS UK and RBS India had to collaborate on the upgrade plan and the back-out plan:

I sent an email about the back-out plan [to the team in Technology Services India] and had to send it to them three times. All they had to do was copy and paste something into the back-out plan. In the end I had to get the quality control guy to cut and paste this into the back-out plan document. It took three emails just to copy and paste something.

The same source said that he was disappointed, because he been loyal to the company for years and felt that this mistake was very avoidable:

"It could have been prevented if the management had listened to us."

Asked for comment, RBS supplied The Register with this statement:

We have been clear we will fully investigate the causes of this incident. We hope people will understand that right now our complete focus is on fixing this problem and helping our customers.

The management and execution of batch processing is carried out in Edinburgh as has been the effort to recover and resolve this issue.

A tale that starts with gummi bear shots in a Dewey bar and ends with a suicide in a New Jersey hotelBy Sean O’Sullivan and Jesse PaulJune 23, 2012, 8:58 a.m.The Daily Times/Dellmarva Now [Gannett]

Hours before she turned up dead in a Dewey Beach motel room, Danielle Mehlman was at a nightspot in town with Pawan Kumar – the man authorities believe later killed her – doing gummi bear shots with a Wilmington couple and showing off jewelry given to her by Kumar.

Dan Caputo and his fiancée, Cheri Duvall, said they did not sense any issue or tension between Mehlman and Kumar, although they were a bit puzzled at the exact nature of the couple’s relationship.

Caputo said at one point, they referred to Kumar as Mehlman’s “boyfriend” and she quickly corrected them to indicate he was not.

“She didn’t consider the relationship dating,” Caputo said. “She said, ‘he likes to buy me things,’ and showed us this jewelry, a gold necklace and two bracelets. She said right in front of him, ‘I’m not having sex with him, I’ve got a boyfriend.’ ” Caputo said that it didn’t seem as if Mehlman was being mean, that she was matter-of-fact about it.

Hours after having drinks with Caputo and Duvall at Jimmy’s Grill, Mehlman’s body was discovered in a room at the Atlantic Oceanside Motel, the first homicide victim in Dewey since the resort incorporated 31 years ago.

Kumar’s body was discovered about 24 hours later at a motel in New Jersey, an apparent suicide.

Interviews with Caputo and Duvall, and with the cabbie who drove Kumar from Dewey to Wilmington, provide a picture of events in the hours before and after Mehlman’s death.

Caputo said due to the fact it was late on a Sunday, they were just about the only people in Jimmy’s Grill besides the bartender, which is apparently why Mehlman struck up a conversation with them at the bar. “She was a bit more tipsy than him,” Caputo said, but Duvall said she did not appear to be drunk.

From the conversation, Caputo said he understood that Mehlman and Kumar had only known each other a short time, perhaps a week.

“I never got a clear explanation as to how they met,” he said, or why she was down at the beach with a man she did not consider to be her boyfriend.

“I think he thought there was more going on in the relationship than she did,” Caputo said, adding that he had difficulty understanding what Kumar said due to his accent.

Kumar, a citizen of India, was in the United States on an H1 B work visa, said Harold Ort, in a statement from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Newark, N.J. The News Journal was unable to determine where he worked or how long he’d been in the country.Mehlman, who was from Bensalem, Pa., told Duvall that she was a schoolteacher, and media reports said she was a teacher at Planet Abacus Charter School in Philadelphia. Site Director Claudia Lyles said Mehlman had previously worked at the school but did not work there this school year.

“She was not here during my time here,” Lyles said. “I’ve been here since the end of November.”

Mehlman worked occasionally at the The Oasis, a gentleman’s club on Essington Avenue just outside of Philadelphia, according to a manager and dancer there. The manager, who identified himself to a reporter but asked that his name not be used, said Mehlman hadn’t worked there long, but once every few weeks would work the 9 p.m.-2 a.m. shift.

The manager said she “was a very sweet girl. She really hated to [work at Oasis]. She was very beautiful, and we hate to lose her. She didn’t cause any problems.”

A Delaware State Police detective visited the club as part of the investigation into Mehlman’s killing, the manager said.

At Jimmy’s Grill, Duvall said she chatted with Mehlman about where to go and what to eat in Dewey Beach. “She was really friendly and told me she was a schoolteacher.

We ‘friended’ each other [on Facebook],” she said, adding Mehlman took a picture of them with her cellphone and promised to send it to them over Facebook.

“While we were sitting there, she showed me a couple of texts from a guy she said she really did like,” Duvall recalled, saying the text was “something about ‘Where are you, I want to see you.’ ”

But, Duvall said, Mehlman reiterated in regard to Kumar, “I’m not going to have sex with this guy because I don’t love him,” but she added that Kumar was next going to take her to buy a Coach purse.

“I guess close to 9 p.m., they said they were going to the Starboard and they wanted us to go,” Duvall said. She and Caputo begged off. “We left and went home [to a beach house] and that was the end of it,” he said.

“Nothing seemed out of the ordinary,” Duvall said, adding she now regrets not going with them to the Starboard. “I have this strange feeling that maybe we should have gone.”

“She really wanted us to go,” she said.

About 10 hours later, just after 7 a.m., Beach Ride Taxi in Lewes got a call from someone who wanted a ride to the Wilmington train station. When dispatch asked him for his name, the man said, “you have my number, that is enough,” according to 56-year-old Jim Allen, owner of Beach Ride.

Allen himself went out on the call and arrived at Old Inlet Bait and Tackle nearly four miles south of the Atlantic Oceanside Motel to pick up his fare. He found a man, whom he later identified to police as Kumar, waiting outside with two plastic bags filled with clothing.

Allen said he immediately recognized the man.

“I saw [Kumar] get thrown out of the Starboard at 10:30 the night before while I was dropping off another fare,” Allen said. “I saw him in the parking lot [with] the bouncer grab[bing Kumar] and pushing him out like ‘you’re not welcome here.’ ”

Allen asked Kumar to show him proof that he had cash to pay for the ride, at which point the passenger pulled out a fistful of bills. Allen asked him how he had gotten to the tackle shop, but Kumar refused to answer.

As the two started heading North on Del. 1, Kumar changed his mind about where he wanted to go and told Allen to take him to 3120 Naamans Road –Kumar’s last known address, according to police – which he said was his parents’ apartment.

“I could barely understand his English, his accent was so heavy,” Allen said. “I asked him to write down the address so I could put it in my GPS. He kept asking every 10 minutes how far away we were.”

Allen tried to strike up a conversation, which, he said, was “like trying to pull teeth.”

“[Kumar] said he was down visiting friends and that his car had broken down,” Allen said. “He told me that his parents owned two businesses in Wilmington and that he had a sister who was in law school at Widener.”

Kumar said that he had only been in the United States for two weeks and was heading back to India on July 1 to attend medical school, Allen said.

At about 9:40 a.m., the pair arrived at the Stratford Apartments complex in Brandywine Hundred, where Kumar paid the $344 fare, with no tip, and Allen drove away.

“He just seemed very, very nervous,” Allen said. “He was disheveled and had the same clothes on as the night before. You could tell he hadn’t shaved.”

At around 10:45 a.m. Monday, a housekeeper at the Atlantic Oceanside Motel in Dewey Beach found Mehlman’s body in a ground-floor room. Police said she had been stabbed multiple times.

A couple staying in the motel said that it was a quiet night and they didn’t see or hear anything unusual.

Sometime after he was dropped off in Brandywine Hundred, Kumar made his way to Belleville, N.J., just north of Newark, according to police.

On Monday night, Kumar checked into the Belleville Motor Lodge and told the clerk he would be checking out the next day, according to the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office. When he failed to check out on Tuesday, employees tried to contact him and found the door to his room was locked.

Belleville police were called and found Kumar’s body in the room and a suicide note, said Deputy Chief Mark Minchini. The medical examiner attributed his death to an overdose.

“There was no information that [Kumar] had any specific links to Belleville that would explain why he went there,” said Katherine Carter of the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office.

State police confirmed Thursday that Kumar had used the cab service to reach Wilmington and said they had investigated evidence in Allen’s car and had spoken to Caputo.

Sgt. Paul Shavack of the Delaware State Police said despite the fact that the suspected killer is dead, an aggressive and thorough investigation is continuing. He said they are still proceeding as if it was a criminal investigation and plan to release the details when it is complete.

Looking back,Duvall said she gets a sick feeling and wonders if Kumar was thinking or planning about what he would later do.

Caputo wonders if Mehlman’s off-hand comment dismissing her relationship with Kumar – and stating that she would not have sex with him – set Kumar off in some way. “I just keep thinking back and wonder if we never had that conversation,” he said.

The couple said they did not realize the importance of their Sunday night meeting until Tuesday when they picked up a copy of The News Journal and read about a murder in Dewey Beach. Caputo then went to delawareonline.com to read more.

That’s when he saw the picture of Kumar released by police and called over his fiancée.

Their first reaction was that it looked just like the person they had met. They didn’t realize it actually was him until they read the story and saw the names.

“When I saw the picture and read the article, I just started to get tears in my eyes,” Duvall said. “Really, it just puts a big lump in my stomach. We really had a good time and planned on keeping in contact. She was so nice.”

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